Vivid, shiver-inducing, short story excerpts stud “The Summer People of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link” over at Longreads. On conjuring a story with the same title as Jackson’s original, iconic, and creepy “The Summer People,” Kelly Link says, “I liked the idea of writing a story where all the play between Jackson’s story and mine would come from the reader, rather than from me.”

Emma Garman tells the story of how Mary Wollstonecraft’s “radical sensibilities” inspired her protégée Margaret King to cross-dress as a man in order to attend medical school and to test “the rigid conventions of an era”.

The deeper I get into this life of writing and making things, the more I understand that I don’t know. … As long as I feel like I’m trying to speak as much truth as I possibly can, and people are willing to publish this and I do the best job I possibly can, then that’s all I can really worry about.

But what rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests imagining the most helpless and vulnerable in our communities as the most powerful, in a kind of 1984-esque doublethink that provides a rationale for causing as much harm as one wishes to that group.

When I talked to him that weekend, he explained I couldn’t have been pregnant because we hadn’t had sex. He knew because he and his dad sometimes hired a bull and watched it work. He’d had sex himself, in the past.

If someone asked to me to sum up what is great about my country, I would probably tell them about Apollo 11, about the four hundred thousand people who worked to make the impossible come true within eight years, about how it changed me to see the space-scarred Columbia capsule in a museum as a child, about how we came in peace for all mankind.

He must be almost ninety, he spends his afternoons gazing out the window at New York’s skyscrapers, a Puerto Rican girl comes each morning to tidy up his apartment, she brings him a dish from Tony’s Café that he reheats in the microwave, and after he listens religiously to the old Béla Bartók records that he knows by heart, he ventures out for a short walk to the entrance of Central Park, in his armoire, in a plastic garment bag, he preserves his general’s uniform, and when he returns from the park, he opens its door and pats the uniform twice on the shoulder, like he would an old friend, then he goes to bed, he’s told me he doesn’t dream, but if he does, it’s only of the sky over the Hungarian plains, he thinks that must be the effect of the sleeping pill an American doctor prescribed.

Be assured, serious readers, that there is no more successful writer at walking the edge of speculation and genre. She’s so good at what she does, that it makes her work nearly impossible to describe without sounding soft or even silly.

Ideally, online longform nonfiction combines the strengths of the print world with those of the Internet, granting writers the rigorous editing and reporting resources they’d get at a magazine but freeing them from the constraints of word limits and limited audiences.

If you’re a fan of longform writing, fiction or nonfiction, consider subscribing to Longreads.

They’re holding a membership drive to help keep the site going; you can choose between $3/month or $30/year memberships, both of which give you access to certain exclusive stories and editor’s picks in addition to the regular content they provide for free.

Sociologist Susan Palmer studies new religious movements—“cults,” as the rest of us might call them—not out of morbid fascination or a desire to catalog their evils, but because she considers them “beautiful life forms, mysterious and pulsating with charisma.”

Of course, it’s a controversial line of work, and involves more than its fair share of ethical quandaries—but none of the ones you’d guess.

Hello

Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny).